Siza Award

Celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Álvaro Siza Archive’s arrival to the Serralves Foundation, 2026 is marked by the creation of the Siza Award, an annual prize that recognizes architectural generosity in emerging practices or architects, currently in their thirties and forties — the same catalytic age that brought the up-and-coming work of Álvaro Siza into the international stage.

The award understands the Sizian spirit of generosity as a totalizing artist vision: in the relationship between plan and project; in the communitarian and environmental implications of land settlement; in the reinvention of formal and material traditions geared toward the future; in the engagement with public space and different inhabiting typologies; in the potential for common good through the construction of a better world.

This somewhat romantic and modern legacy of Gesamtkunstwerk, of total design, is rooted upon an objectively individual form of expression — particularly drawing, in its many techniques or mediums — and an optimistic calling for a continuous dialogue between shared natural landscapes and everchanging cities, striving to fix imbalances and inequalities through creative acts — big or small, local or universal — that genuinely care for each site and each person.

Architects were always agents of change with a meaningful impact in the democratic discourse, whether in the post-war reconstruction of urban identities or, in Portugal’s case, in the post-revolution framing of social inclusion. A new generation is now called upon to bridge the gap between human scarcity and technological advancement, rethinking the rules of the game and exploring archetypes, materials, shelters, labor, and other ways of improving life as a whole. This is not a philosophical or activist stance, but rather a profoundly architectural mission, not unlike Álvaro Siza’s devotion for affordable housing neighborhoods across Europe.

Geographically, his body of work is spread globally from North to South, from East to West, so the Siza Award for architectural generosity hopes to challenge and inspire the international community through the appreciation of more or less peripheral practices, whose budding projects contain a potential for sensitive excellence and didactic synergy. The award ceremony during the Siza Talks is just the beginning of a larger conversation in time with every laureate, which includes an exhibition at the Serralves Foundation, as well as a publication and public lectures on culture, space, geometry, promenade, nature, light, humanity and expectations.

There are no submissions, the nominees are proposed by a group of invited experts — architects, curators, critics and institutional representatives — that do so anonymously, in order to preserve the legitimacy of the process, between winter and spring. Each year, the jury will consist of the Serralves Foundation’s Director of Architecture, five permanent members of its Consulting Committee, and two rotating members that convene in the summer.

The award also carries a monetary prize, featuring a metallic trophy designed by Álvaro Siza himself, that represents the triangular threshold of the Siza Wing and celebrates the third anniversary of its opening to the public.